Penny Wise and Penny Foolish - column

Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Penny Wise and Penny Foolish

Emptying one’s pockets at the end of a busy day of bringing home that metaphorical bacon reminds us of how useless is all that pot-metal we take as change and then carry around almost to no purpose.

In Ye Olden Days a pocket full of coins was a good thing: a cup of coffee cost a nickel, as did the daily paper and a Hershey bar, a Coca-Cola was six cents, a telephone call was a dime, and a hamburger was a quarter. These things weren’t cheaper; it’s that the money was worth more.

Around 1983 some alligator-shoe boy ruled that the copper penny should no longer be made of copper, but rather copper-clad, whatever that means. A penny now appears to be made of painted floor-sweepings, and is worthless. Dimes, quarters, and half-dollars, once made of silver, are as substantial as Monopoly® money. Purchasing power now begins only with the dollar, and a bouquet of dollars at that.

Why, then, does the government still manufacture play money, and why do we carry it around?

For adults the penny is probably a matter of sentiment. Although there is no longer any such thing as a piece of penny candy, we remember those childhood days and so remain attached to pennies that really aren’t even pennies. A penny is rather like Prince Albert in a can, which no longer exists even as the wheezy telephone joke: “Have you got Prince Albert in a can? Well, you better let him out before he suffocates!”

Canada rid itself of the penny in 2013, saving $11 million a year in bothering with them. The Dominion does not seem to have suffered thereby. Since Canadian pennies are the same size as U.S. pennies they show up in circulation south of the 49th fairly often. If you save your Canadian pennies then in a few years they will be worth, well, nothing. But the Maple Leaf is pretty.

Spanish escudos and reales have not circulated hereabouts since 1821 or so, and the English pound has not purchased any tea on the east coast since the tiff beginning in 1776. However, the old saying “penny wise and pound foolish,” meaning thrift in small matters but wastage in greater ones, lingers, much like the penny.

One wonders if, two hundred years ago, moms and dads in Nacogdoches, Anahuac, and San Augustine cautioned their children about being reale wise and escudo foolish.

-30-